Death Penalty News

"Last Address" commemorative plaque The country's Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes on Tuesday launched a new project to commemorate victims of former Czechoslovakia's communist regime. Called "Last Address", the idea was inspired by similar initiatives in Russia. Within the project, plaques will be installed at victims' final addresses - recalling their lives and what they stood for, for which they died. Tuesday is the 67th anniversary of the execution of Milada Horakova a member of parliament and democrat found guilty in a notorious show trial in 1950 staged by Czechoslovakia's Communist regime. The death penalty was carried out in spite of last minute pleas for clemency from the likes of Albert Einstein and the Pope. The day has seen a number of commemorative events honouring her memory but also that of others who suffered and perished as enemies of the regime. "Last Address" focusses on those who never came back. ...

A Chinese police officer lights an inmate's last cigarette moments before his execution.  BEIJING — There was an ear-splitting whistle and Kong Ning, a young supervising officer from Beijing, saw blood spurt from the bodies of the 34 prisoners, all men in their 20s and 30s, kneeling in a row in front of her. One man’s head was blown off completely. She collapsed on the muddy ground. Ms. Kong was traumatized by the executions, which she watched over on a bitterly cold day in November 1983, when China’s first wave of “strike-hard” campaigns against rising crime was in full swing. After the event, she quit her job and became a lawyer in the hope of defending people unjustly accused of crime. But over the years she suffered several mental breakdowns, at one point being admitted to a psychiatric hospital for a few months. Now, she always dresses in black — and she always wears a bulletproof vest. In 2006, she started to paint, primarily as a way to cope with the trau...

The director of the museum in Targoviste gestures to the spot  where Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena were executed  by a former military unit on December 25, 1989. Romanians nostalgic for the communist era gathered Thursday at the grave of former dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, who were tried and executed on Christmas Day twenty-five years ago. Some Romanians have made the pilgrimage to the Ghencea cemetery into an annual tradition . This year, about 15 people gathered at the burial place. Ceausescu's 24-year-rule was characterized in the later years by food and power shortages and a lack of basic freedoms. But the few Romanians who turned up at his grave expressed nostalgia for an era where there was more security. Caltea Oprea, a retired engineer, clutched two beeswax candles and said his red knitted scarf was a symbol of communism. "After communism ended we were run by thieves and bandits," he told The Associated Press. "Ceause...

The director of the museum in Targoviste gestures to the spot where Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena were executed by a former military unit on December 25, 1989. AFP - The grim barracks where Romania's brutal communist despot Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena were executed are to be opened to the public in the latest bid to boost "dictator tourism". The former military unit at Targoviste, 100 kilometres (60 miles) northwest of Bucharest, is to be turned into a museum and is due to welcome its first visitors in early September. "Many Romanians and foreigners said they wanted to see the wall against which Ceausescu and his wife Elena were shot on December 25, 1989," Ovidiu Carstina, director of the museum, told AFP. The death of the Ceausescus became one of the defining images of the revolutions which convulsed eastern and central Europe in 1989. On December 22, as angry crowds gathered in front of the Communist Party headquarters,...